Within a 15 minute walk of Camp Nou (home of FC Barcelona), The Open Group Conference “kicked off” on Monday morning with some excellent plenary presentations from Scott Radedztsky of Deloitte followed by Peter Haviland and Mick Adams of Ernst & Young, and after the break from Helen Sun of Oracle and finally Ron Tolido and Manuel Sevilla from Capgemini. You can see most of these Big Data presentations for yourself on The Open Group’s Livestream page.

The “second half” of the day was split into tracks for Big Data, Enterprise Architecture (EA), TOGAF® and ArchiMate®. Henry Franken of BiZZdesign talked about EA in terms of TOGAF and ArchiMate (you can see this on our Livestream site, too) and the other ArchiMate presentations from Peter Filip of Tatra Bank, Gerben Wierda of APG Asset Management and Mieke Mahakena of Capgemini were also well received by an enthusiastic audience. Networking and drinks followed at the end of the track sessions, and the “crowd” went away happy after day one.

Tuesday started with a plenary presentation by Dr. Robert Winter from the University of St Gallen on EA and Transformation Management. See the following clip to learn more about his presentation and his research.

This was followed by tracks on distributed services architecture, security, TOGAF 9 case studies, information architecture, quantum lifecycle management (QLM) and a new track on Practice Driven Research on Enterprise Transformation (PRET) and Trends in EA Research (TEAR). The evening entertainment on day two consisted of dinner and a spectacular flamenco dancing show at the Palacio de Flamenco – where a good time was had by all.

After the show there was also time for a number of us to watch Barcelona v. Celtic in their European Champions League match at the Camp Nou. This is the view from my seat:

The game ended in a 2-1 victory for Barcelona, and following the game there was much debate and friendly banter in the bar between the conference delegates and the Celtic fans that were staying at our hotel.

The track theme continued on day three of the conference along with member meetings such as the next version of TOGAF Working Group, the TOGAF Standard and ArchiMate Language Harmonization Project, Certification Standing Committee, and TOGAF Value Realization Working Group, etc. Member meetings of the Architecture Forum and Security Forum were held on Thursday and brought the Barcelona event to its conclusion.

At the end of the day, if your “goal” is to listen to some great presentations, network with your peers, participate in meetings and influence the generation of new IT standards, then you should get a ticket for our next fixture in Newport Beach, Calif., USA on January 28-31, 2013. The theme, again, will be Big Data.

I look forward to seeing you there!

Steve Philp is the Marketing Director at The Open Group. Over the past 20 years, Steve has worked predominantly in sales, marketing and general management roles within the IT training industry. Based in Reading, UK, he joined the Open Group in 2008 to promote and develop the organization’s skills and experience-based IT certifications. More recently, he has become responsible for corporate marketing as well as certification.